The present invention relates to a camera system, a monitoring camera control terminal and a protocol changing method.
There is a monitoring camera system that is provided with a monitoring camera apparatus which can send a captured image through a network and can be connected to the network, and a monitoring camera control terminal which can display the image captured by the monitoring camera apparatus after receiving it through the network.
Some monitoring camera apparatuses which configure the monitoring camera system and which are network connectable are provided with a function to set a variety of functions provided for the monitoring camera apparatus from a remote monitoring camera control terminal through the network, or a function to receive instructions to perform operations such as panning, tilting, and zooming.
As a protocol specifying communication messages for instructing a variety of settings and operations which are performed between the monitoring camera apparatus and the monitoring camera control terminal through the network, an original protocol which can be used by each company between its own products only was mostly defined and used conventionally. But, today there have appeared standard protocols which can be used in common between the products of two or more companies.
To newly meet a standard protocol in development of products such as the monitoring camera apparatus and the monitoring camera control terminal, it is necessary to develop new software for realizing control using the standard protocol and to apply to the individual products.
It is generally presumed that newly developed software has a large number of defects. But software for realizing the control using an original protocol of each company has a good record of being applied to each product and used up to now for a certain period and its defects which have become obvious are being fixed. Therefore, it is presumed that software quality has become higher.
In such a case, to realize control for setting, operation and the like more securely between the monitoring camera apparatus and the monitoring camera control terminal, it is general to use a technique that both of software for realizing control using an original protocol which is assumed to have higher quality and software for realizing control using a newly developed standard protocol are applied to provide multiplexed software for controlling, and if either of them had a problem, switching to the other is performed.
As a technology for improving the availability of the whole apparatus by multiplexing the software as described above, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-333990 is directed to updating of a program and proposes a method that stores both of a currently operating program and a new program which is an updated version of the former program, and if a startup failure of the new program is detected, the operating program before updating is used to continue the operation of the device.